Eddie Izzard and the Non-Lost Art

Over the weekend I partook in the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival festivities in fabulous Montreal and caught the comic stylings of Mr. Eddie Izzard. I greatly appreciate Izzard’s approach to comedy because he makes jokes about historical events, pop culture, technology and other subjects of general passing interest and misunderstanding.

I hate these comedians who just get up there and complain about their crappy marriage or make jokes about growing up in a big Italian family in Brooklyn or something else that I can’t relate to; or even worse these assholes who pick on some poor sod in the audience. Maybe these guys were considered to be a real panic by their peers at their local AA meetings but I just find them depressing.

Izzard makes upbeat silly jokes about ancient Egypt, and obviously neither he nor anybody in the audience was from ancient Egypt and so we could relate to the topic as much as he could and have a good laugh together based on our equal distance from the topic. I’m not going to sit here and detail his entire set but he covered some great topics such as creationism, libraries and the Alien movies. I found it really odd since I had actually just watched all three of those films as part of a self-imposed detox program to recover from the awfulness of this other film I saw called Transformers because I needed to restore my faith in sci-fi action movies.

I find it odd that stand-up comedy has actually endured. I always figured people would stop going to comedy shows the way church attendance has steadily dwindled. Stand-up is remarkably low-tech and simple, but so is sex and people still like doing that so maybe I don’t have point. But I’ll continue like I do anyway. Maybe people don’t go to church because they don’t need their dwindling faith in heaven and ethics reaffirmed anymore, maybe if churches would start showing the Alien movies to help reaffirm the dwindling faith in sci-fi action movies then attendance would go up. I don’t know. But I am sure Jesus loved Alien 3 for all its self-sacrificial martyrdom, and I’m not even going to touch on what I imagine the Good Lord thinks of Alien: Resurrection.

I’ve watched stand-up comedy DVDs of Eddie Izzard, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy and many others and I have to say that I generally laugh much more than I do at most scripted comedy movies. I realize that telling jokes on a stage allows for a rapid fire of punchlines where acted scenes take a bit a longer to set up. But the kids who like these Transformers movies probably appreciate all the production value of sets, editing, visuals, and sounds that go into these unfunny comedy movies and that’s why stand-up routines don’t get shown at the cinemas and crap like Meet Your Parents, Focker or whatever does. But I’ve got a solution.

What we need is a way to combine the advantages of big screen entertainment with the constant flow of punchlines and comedic topical freedom of stand-up. What I want to do is remake The Magnificent Seven only with a cast entirely of comedians and replace all the dialogue with materiel from stand-up acts. I don’t want a spoof on cowboy movies or any of the comedians to actually be characters that really interact per se.

It will still be a story about seven cowboys defending a peasant village from bandits except that while they’re shooting at each other they’ll be monologuing about unrelated subjects in a humorous way. I want Eddie Izzard to take the James Coburn role. When that guy tries to test his knife throwing skills Eddie will stand up and start making impromptu jokes about the Roman Empire and when he’s done he’ll chuck the knife into the other fellow.

I want Jerry Seinfeld to take the Eli Wallach role of the head evil bandit. That scene where he gives the village the ultimatum of giving him their produce or dying will have the dialogue replaced with some jokes about modern social etiquette, only it will still be intercut with shots of weeping peasants.

The audience will feel like they’re getting a story, even though the dialogue won’t match the characters’ actions, plus they’ll get some violence and a bit of music. That way everybody gets to go home happy and they can’t say they weren’t entertained. Maybe we’ll even have naked ladies dance during the credits.

So, yeah, I highly recommend seeing Mr. Izzard and discovering the world of stand-up comedy at Just For Laughs.